And We Do This Ltdhttps://www.andwedothis.com
Just another WordPress siteSun, 18 Feb 2018 22:38:24 +0000en-GBhourly1We’re Hiringhttps://www.andwedothis.com/2018/02/were-hiring/
Sun, 18 Feb 2018 16:42:25 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=43678Would you like to help us launch a new mobile app for use by small businesses?

To help get this exciting new product out there, we’re looking for one or more individuals to join us as sales agents, working on a very attractive commission structure and bonuses, starting at £200 per app sold!

We are initally looking to target the Scottish Borders, Glasgow/Edinburgh belt and the north of England, with areas being split between successful candidates.

You will also be acting as a brand ambassador for And We Do This, so it’s vital that you fit with our ethos, etc. – we do not do hard-pressure sales!

If this sounds interesting, get in touch in the first instance by emailing Andrew McEwan at mailroom@andwedothis.com, telling us a bit about yourself.

]]>Enterprising Students at Kelso High Schoolhttps://www.andwedothis.com/2017/09/enterprising-students-kelso-high-school/
Tue, 26 Sep 2017 13:36:18 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=43655After a few years' absence, Kelso High School is entering a team in Young Enterprise Scotland 2017, aided by their Business Adviser Andrew McEwan of And We Do This.

]]>It’s great that Kelso High School is taking part in Young Enterprise Scotland again this year after a few years absence. I’ve resumed my role as Business Adviser to the school’s YES team, and they are a brilliant group. Look out for some brilliant products from them very soon.

]]>Google Stops Showing Right Sidebar Ads on Desktop Searcheshttps://www.andwedothis.com/2016/03/google-removes-right-sidebar-ads-desktop-searches/
Wed, 02 Mar 2016 08:41:34 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3712Google is no longer showing PPC ads in the right sidebar on desktop searches. Why have they done this and what does this mean for advertisers?

]]>Google has just rolled out a significant change to its search engine results pages. The search engine giant has removed all Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements from the right-hand side of desktop results pages. It is the first major change to their search results page since April of 2015.

Google’s search engine results will now show between 1-4 PPC advertisements above the search results and between 1-3 additional advertisements below the search results. Google first increased the maximum advertisement count on the top of the page to 4 in December 2015 — a change that wasn’t particularly popular with SEOs because it pushed organic results further down the page. Google says that 4 advertisements will only be used for what it calls “highly commercial queries”.

The SEM Post quotes a number of advertisers who have been told by Google Adwords representatives that the change is “permanent”. Search Engine Land have also received confirmation from Google via email that the change is worldwide and has finished rolling out.

The right-hand side of the search results page will now display one of three things:

White Space: space is left empty for some search terms.

Product Listing Ad (PLA) boxes: search ads that include rich product information, including the product image, price and merchant name

The Knowledge Panel: when searching for a specific person, place, business, famous event or object, Google makes relevant information easy to access via the knowledge panel. Advertisements can sometimes be contained within the knowledge panel.

It’s not the first time that Google has removed right side ads from their search results. They previously experimented with the approach back in 2012, however, decided to return to their traditional layout. Permanent changes to Google’s results page have been a fairly rare occurrence in recent years, however, they are constantly testing user experience updates.

Why Has Google Gone Down This Path?

There is some conjecture as to why Google has dropped advertisements from the right-hand side of their search results pages. Some possible reasons for the change include:

Google are aligning the desktop browsing experience with mobile

Google have made it clear in the past that they are pursuing mobile-centric design. That means they are taking the user experience and design of their mobile products and emulating that approach on desktop computers. There is no section for advertisements on the right side of mobile devices and these new changes to their desktop product reflects that.

More space for Google’s Product Listing Ads

Google has done very well with their Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in recent years.

The additional space on the right sidebar allows them to place large PLAs without making the layout seem overly crowded. On popular product searches, Google is using a large PLA with two rows of four products. The PLAs are well above the fold and Google clearly believes they are a better use of space.

Push Users to Click More Advertisements

When a search result is for a highly commercial term (for example, “buy black socks”), the top 50% of the screen is full of advertisements — 4 Adwords advertisements and Google’s Product Listing Ads. Unless a user is specifically looking for a certain business or the advertisements aren’t appealing, the majority of clicks will be on those ads.

Dr Pete Meyers, marketing scientist at moz.comtweeted some figures indicating that of 10,000 search terms, 6,000 had advertisements. Of those 6,000, 36% displayed 1 ad, 17% displayed 2 ads, 28% displayed 3 ads and 19% displayed 4 ads. These figures suggest that almost half of pages with advertisements will have the top section of the page dominated by Google Adwords — driving users to click ads instead of using organic search results.

What it Means For Businesses

There are two key takeaways from this change for businesses who use Google for traffic.

1) PPC is Even More Important (and more expensive!)
The total number of Adwords text advertisements on each results page has now shrunk from a maximum of 11 to a maximum of 7 (4 advertisements above the search engine results and 3 below the results). That means there is much more competition for advertising space on each page, which will lead to an increase in advertising costs. Businesses may have to increase their PPC budgets and think of clever new ways to maximise the benefit gained from their Adwords budget.

2) High Rankings in SEO is Even More Important
Despite the top of the page being dominated by Adwords advertisements, SEO remains very important. Ranking in the top 3 for a search term will be crucial — those top listings will remain above the page fold for popular search terms that have 3 or 4 Adwords ads dominating the top of the page.

With these changes, it has just become slightly more difficult to maintain a prominent position in Google’s organic search results.

]]>Make Video Marketing Part of Your Marketing Mixhttps://www.andwedothis.com/2016/02/video-marketing/
Fri, 26 Feb 2016 08:38:37 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3709With YouTube being the world's second biggest search engine and more than 4 billion videos viewed on Facebook every day, can you afford to ignore video for your business?

]]>If you are a business owner, you probably already know the importance of dynamic, innovative marketing strategies. After all, SEO (search engine optimisation) is a popular buzzword in the online world, and countless small businesses are investing in an SEO strategy. But are they missing out when it comes to video?

Simply put, SEO plans can include many different components, but usually include regular content creation, an active social media presence, careful attention paid to keywords, an attempt to analyse Google rankings and regular guest posting or link building. While these strategies are indeed often part of a successful SEO plan, many people – even experts – fail to include one of the most important components: video marketing.

The importance of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram Videos

You are undoubtedly familiar with the prevalence of Google – we use this search engine so much that it is its own verb! But did you know that the world’s second most popular search engine is none other than YouTube? That’s right – this online video database processes more than 3 billion unique searches each month. Nearly one out of every two internet users regularly access YouTube – that is a lot of potential that you are squandering if you are not creating videos.

Facebook is increasingly becoming another video giant – over 4 billion videos are viewed on Facebook each and every day in countries around the world.

Facebook Live, Periscope and Meerkat

Live video streaming sites are changing the game yet again – watching your friends and perfect strangers live their lives on camera may seem like an episode of the Twilight Zone, but the future is here and users are clamouring for these apps. Periscope, Meerkat and Facebook Live are taking video to the next level for advertisers and video marketing.

The importance of a professional video

With the advent of ever-increasing smartphone technology, we are all carrying around sophisticated video production cameras in our pockets or handbags. While the ability to shoot cool videos is now in everyone’s hands, when it comes to creating a video for your company, hiring a professional is still your best bet. As Internet users, we are inundated with amateur content every single day – in order to make your video stand out, you need to create something special that provides value to your client.

Your video should be engaging, useful and have purpose, and should mesh with your brand and marketing strategy. Ideally it will help to introduce a new segment of your target demographic to your brand, product or service, and will hopefully leverage the other online marketing strategies that you have already implemented.

Remember – if you are thinking that video is not well suited to your business you couldn’t be further from the truth – brands and businesses of all types are utilising video. With some creative thinking, it’s amazing what video can do for you and your brand!

]]>SSL certificates can sound like an intimidating affair, even more so when referred to by their full name: Secure Sockets Layer Certificate. Add to this plenty of misinformation and seriously confusing guides upon HTTPS and you can end up with a spinning head and very little in the way of straight forward guidance. So, here we ditch the technobabble and provide a super-easy-to-understand guide as to what SSL certificates are and why, if you’re the owner of an online shop, you may really need one.

SSL Certificates: Getting to Grips With the Basics

The basics of an SSL certificate are simple and are an important way of making your customers feel safe whilst shopping online with you, as well as their payments being protected by technology.

What’s more they’re superfast to install – in the majority of instances being installable within a matter of mere minutes.

A Quick, Confusion-Free Overview on SSL

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, may also be known as Transport Layer Security, or TLS (just because there isn’t already enough confusion around the matter!)

SSL can be thought of a set process for both securing and protecting data that is sent from one place to another – and it needn’t merely be for financial transactions only either, going on to include sensitive data such as your customer’s name, address and date of birth.

SSL works alongside encryption (which is a fancy word for a scrambled message) to help keep the movement of this data private and protected. Whenever a message is sent to a website using SSL it passes a checkpoint which effectively decides whether that message is all-in tact and completely unaffected by potential interference.

You probably use SSL every single day – on websites such as Facebook, Amazon and Twitter. When SSL is working in the background your activity is being silently protected from cybercriminals who may otherwise be listening in on your messages and communications or, perhaps most seriously, stealing your financial information when buying online.

How Do You Know Whether a Website Uses SSL?

Working out whether a website uses SSL is superfast and particularly straightforward. Simply look for either/or:

A lock symbol that appears before the website address in the browser bar

A web address that beings with https rather than http.

A surprising potential effect of SSL

As of August 2014 Google announced that they’d add a ‘lightweight ranking signal’ to those websites that featured SSL. Which basically means that there’s a nice little search result position boost to those opting to secure their website through an SSL certificate.

Does Your Online Shop Need SSL?

After all of the above it seems straightforward to assume an SSL certificate would be needed by any and every form of online store. However this may not be the case if you don’t actually capture or store sensitive data.

So where may this apply?

Well, in the majority of such instances it is where an offsite payment processor is in place (such as PayPal); these guys actually capture and store the sensitive data for you, and it’s their job to ensure that the data is secure.

An important point upon accounts and login details

Whilst you may use an offsite payment service, you may still require customers to create an account or login details as part of the purchasing process. When they do this they may provide data such as their name, address and email address. Of course this data is far from complete card numbers and account details, nevertheless it can still provide the cybercriminal underworld with all they need to eventually gain access to your customers’ accounts. A leading and increasingly common example of which is Phishing – where emails trick their recipients into divulging the information that the hacker may be missing, such as card or bank account information.

We always use SSL on all online shops, and strongly recommend that it is now also used in other ‘brochure’ websites.

]]>Ecommerce: 2016https://www.andwedothis.com/2016/01/ecommerce-2016/
Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:04:32 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3691Are you ready for the challenges of ecommerce in 2016? Selling online is the fastest growing retail sector in the UK. Can you afford to be missing out?

]]>Happy New Year! Another year has come and gone, and as I promised last time, I’m going to take a look at ecommerce for 2016. I don’t want to bore you with a bunch of boring stats, but let’s zip through a few so we can get some context. The Centre for Retail Research tells us in a survey that online sales in the UK continue to grow. In 2014 online shoppers spent £44.97bn online, which was 15.8% up on the previous year. Over the following 12 months, they spent £52.25bn online, an increase of 16.2% on 2014.

Figures across Europe show similar increases indicating that ecommerce is the fastest growing retail market in Europe. Germany showed a larger growth of 23.1%, but is still playing catch up with the UK with online sales in 2015 of £44.61bn. According to research compiled by OC&C Strategy Consultants, PayPal and Google, Britain is the most popular overseas online destination for German shoppers. The report goes on to state that the UK is also very popular with Chinese customers: “Chinese and German shoppers are more valuable than their British counterparts. They spend on average 2.7 and 1.7 times more in each transaction.”

Anita Balchandani, head of retail at OC&C, said: “The study has shown that UK retailers are some of the world’s most popular and are in a strong position to seize more opportunities abroad. But at the moment, the majority are only doing the basics to adequately serve foreign markets.”

If you are not already exporting your products, ask yourself why. If you have no experience in selling to non-domestic markets, the prospect can seem daunting. In my own local area The Scottish Borders Exporters Association is an ideal way to meet others in the same boat and to gain insights from those who have been exporting for years. Find out what similar organisations are in your area.

Creating an ecommerce strategy isn’t something that can be explained in this short article, but there are some fundamentals that should be addressed. For example, if your website is not mobile-friendly you can more or less forget about making many sales. With so many people (your potential customers) accessing the Internet and web via a mobile device in one form or another, ensuring that your website works well on mobile is an absolute must.

A few other main questions you need to ask yourself include:

What are you selling and how will it benefit your customers?

Who are your customers, what are they like, what is important to them?

How will you communicate with your customers and build your ‘audience’?

Considering these – and the plethora of other things that need answered – is why you need a co-ordinated approach to your project, be it ecommerce or other. It’s not a case of building a little website, doing a bit of Facebook here, making a quick video there, and sending out an email newsletter when the fancy takes you. There has to be a strategy behind it all that gives you a clear understanding of how your marketing channels work with each other, and how you can measure the success of each activity.

Over the coming months we’ll look further into these and how you can implement them yourself or with the help of a professional.

]]>Has the UK Fallen Out of Love with Black Friday?https://www.andwedothis.com/2015/11/has-the-uk-fallen-out-of-love-with-black-friday/
Sat, 28 Nov 2015 17:36:05 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3683It came from States in 2013 and caused an almighty stir. But with UK shops reporting none of the chaotic scenes witnessed at some stores in 2014, have we had our fill of Black Friday?

]]>Black Friday has come and gone, and what a difference a year makes. Last year we were witness to scenes reminiscent of riots as shoppers hungry for bargains stampeded into stores as soon as the doors opened. This year has been a far more subdued affair.

If you’re still in the dark as to where Black Friday came from, it originates from the United States – now there’s a surprise – where retailers want to kick start Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving.

ASDA was the first retailer to being Black Friday to the UK in 2013, with many more shops jumping on the bandwagon the following year. The frenzy it created took many by surprise, with social media flooded with videos showing buyers fighting and clamouring to get their hands on cut price big ticket goods. You could have been forgiven for thinking the chaos was down to an impending Armageddon rather than simply a sale.

This year has seen less concentration of deals being only available on Black Friday itself, with many retailers opting to spread offers over a week. Ironically, ASDA, who brought Black Friday to the UK, opted out of it altogether, putting it down to “shopper fatigue around flash sales”. Hardly surprising following the scenes at some of their stores last year. Other stores who did partake were reporting a far more orderly affair for 2015.

Rather than goods flying off the shelves, this year shops have been finding that some of their bargains were not being snapped up. So, has the British public had their fill of Black Friday? Going by an announcement from Amazon the day after Black Friday, it would appear not. The online retailer reported their UK site had experienced its busiest day ever. In just the one day it sold an eye-watering 7.4 million items. That’s 86 items every second! Last year it shifted a paltry 5.5 million items in the same period.

Other retailers with ecommerce sites reported very high traffic, with Argos’s website experiencing delays and John Lewis’s online shop was unavailable during the afternoon of Black Friday for a short period. Some tech experts estimate the downtime could have costed John Lewis around £2.8m in lost sales.

So, far from falling out of love with Black Friday, we’ve simply moved our emphasis from shopping in store to shopping online. Experian-IMRG predicted that total online sales on Black Friday would hit £1.07bn, 32% up on 2014’s figure of £810m. That’s a big pie and it shows no signs of getting smaller, but how do you get a slice of it. The big retailers can throw huge budgets at their online presence, but what about the rest of us? Next time, we’ll take a look at some ecommerce strategies for 2016.

]]>Facebook Lead Ads: Helping Customers Connect With Your Businesshttps://www.andwedothis.com/2015/10/facebook-lead-ads/
Fri, 09 Oct 2015 13:36:54 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3669Lead ads are a more direct way to run lead generation campaigns on Facebook. They let users express interest your product or service by filling out a form with their details which enables you to follow up with them.

]]>It’s hard to remember life without smartphones. Most of us use them for everything from keeping in touch with friends to sharing funny websites on our social media pages. But one thing has always been difficult to do with a smartphone – let a business know that you’re interested in knowing more about their products or services.

The reason? It’s significantly harder to fill in those business signup forms on a mobile phone. In fact, it’s estimated that filling out a form on a mobile phone takes an average of 38.4% longer than filling out that same form on a desktop computer. This increase in difficulty means that many potential customers simply give up on trying to fill in forms on their mobile phones… and if you’re in business, that means you’re losing valuable leads.

Facebook Lead Ads

Now Facebook is attempting to solve this vexing problem with its latest feature, lead ads. When your business runs a lead ad, Facebook shows it to a targeted audience of people on their mobile phones who are most likely to be interested in your business. The idea is that interested potential customers will then be more likely to request price estimates, newsletters, product demos, test drives or special offers from your business… because Facebook has dramatically simplified the process of signing up for business information from a mobile phone.

How have they done this? Well, Facebook has developed a highly customizable lead ad form, so you can easily choose which information you most want to collect for your business. Then, when someone clicks on your lead ad, your form opens with the person’s contact information automatically populated, using the information they’ve already shared with Facebook. All it takes for customers to sign up for updates from your business is two clicks: one to open the ad, and another to submit the pre-filled form. (Of course, Facebook has made concessions for user privacy – potential customers have the option to edit or omit information before clicking ‘submit.’)

Facebook has already started to improve their lead ads – you can now add open-ended or multiple-choice questions to your signup forms, so your business can get the information that matters most to your marketing goals. The next step will be making lead ads available in more formats, including video and carousel, so businesses can collect leads from people on any device.

]]>Facebook Starts Testing Reactionshttps://www.andwedothis.com/2015/10/facebook-starts-testing-reactions/
Fri, 09 Oct 2015 08:33:14 +0000https://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3664In a big week for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has posted that they are testing a new, more expressive Like button - they're calling it 'Reactions'. Initial testing is being carried out in Ireland and Spain before it is rolled out elsewhere.

]]>In a big week for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has posted that they are testing a new, more expressive Like button – they’re calling it ‘Reactions’. Initial testing is being carried out in Ireland and Spain before it is rolled out elsewhere.

As the Facebook CEO explains,

For many years though, people have asked us to add a “dislike” button. Not every moment is a good moment, and sometimes you just want a way to express empathy. These are important moments where you need the power to share more than ever, and a Like might not be the best way to express yourself.

At a recent Townhall Q&A, I shared with our community that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to give you better options for expressing yourself, while keeping the experience simple and respectful. Today we’re starting to test this.

Reactions gives you new ways to express love, awe, humor and sadness. It’s not a dislike button, but it does give you the power to easily express sorrow and empathy — in addition to delight and warmth. You’ll be able to express these reactions by long pressing or hovering over the Like button.

.Initial reactions seem to mixed, with many welcoming the new button, while others wish they already had a ‘dislike’ button so that they could dislike his post. Well, with almost 1.5 billion users, you’re not going to please all the people all the time.

What will be interesting is to see if they different ‘Reactions’ options will have varying weight on Facebook’s engagement algorithm.

]]>How to Make Your Website Run Fasterhttps://www.andwedothis.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-website-run-faster/
Fri, 18 Sep 2015 13:23:00 +0000http://www.andwedothis.com/?p=3641A quarter of your website's traffic will be gone in four seconds if your website doesn't load in time. Guest blogger Rick Talavera of Singlehop explains how to ensure your website is running as fast as possible, and includes a handy infographic.

]]>One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi

Four seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time at all, but in the instant-gratification world that we live in today, four seconds is all that stands between your website and 25% of your total website traffic. A quarter of all website visitors will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in under four seconds. Not only does a slow site jeopardise a quarter (or more!) of your traffic, it can signal to Google that your site has a poor user experience and dock your influence in the search engine results.

We’ve put together a list of best practices for speed optimization to help you clear out some of the dust bunnies in your code. Following these general rules can not only increase your site speed but also your potential reach and ultimately customer conversion.

Rule 1: Test, test, test

You can’t track improvement if you don’t have a base variable to compare it to. Regularly testing your website speed is crucial to developing a cleanup plan and monitoring all speed progress. There are plenty of resources available online to test the speed of your site for free – we suggest testing your site on at least two different platforms:

When testing your site speed and developing your blueprint, keep the following points in mind:

What errors are consistent among tests?

Could multiple speed bumps be resolved with one change?

Are there any old site functions that could be removed altogether?

Rule 2: Run a frontend diagnosis

Running a website is a lot like a owning car: if you invest in trying to make it look nice on the outside but forego investing in the infrastructure under the bonnet, you run the risk of having a shiny but absolutely useless car. A brand new spoiler isn’t going to save your car from a dead engine in the same way that an excessive number of plugins won’t save your website from outdated code. What’s the use of having a great-looking website if your customers aren’t patient enough to load it? When it comes to optimisation, checking under the bonnet of your site a great place to start.

Take a good, hard look at both the layout of your content and code. Can your content be restructured? Can your code be simplified? The world of web development is constantly changing, so what made sense for your site five years ago might not make sense for it now. Re-evaluate your site structure and remove any duplicate content to help reduce site “weight” and improve user experience.

Replace any dense plugins like Flash with HTML5. While Flash can breathe life into your pages, it brings with it a whole host of baggage, both in terms of actual weight and in terms of user experience. As its name suggests, Flash has an infamous reputation for being a diva and hogging your PC in all the wrong ways: resource-hoarding, clunkiness, poor UX… It even has it’s own Occupy movement. HTML5 can not only do the majority of what Flash can do quicker, but it comes with a significant advantage: HTML5 is optimized for all mobile platforms, whereas Flash is not. That means that if your site is dependent on Flash, you’re losing a significant amount of mobile traffic, which is one of the biggest reasons why many of today’s industry leaders are calling for an end to Flash.

Speaking of mobile, consider the mobile responsiveness of your website. This year, after a lot of anticipation, we’ve finally seen mobile search volume outweigh desktop search volume, and its upward trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. While you’re adjusting your site’s structure, be sure to take into consideration how your site currently reacts to being accessed through tablets and smartphones. Optimizing your website to go fully responsive – in other words, adaptable and accessible across many different platforms and devices sizes – can not only help improve your site speed on these platforms but can give you a tiny boost in the search engine results over competition who have yet to make responsive site changes.

Rule 3: Invest in backend upgrades

The backend of your site is responsible for digesting requests made by the visitor and delivering the requested data back to the visitor. Like the support beams of a house, a website’s backend is seldom physically seen by a website viewer, but is critical for site function. Backend development simply makes sure that all of the website pieces are stored on a host and are accessible when requested. Queries that are poorly coded, too large, or poorly managed can stall data requests and become a roadblock for the user.

One quick way to help streamline the communication between a website host and the user is to strip and condense the request script as much as possible through a process called minification. Minification takes a look at your source code and takes out any and all unnecessary characters like whitespace characters and commas. This minimizes your script size and therefore the size of the data request itself, which in turn decreases page load time. Minification plugins can be found and run online for JavaScript, WordPress and Drupal.

Another quick and easy trick to speed up backend load times is a process called caching. caching is a common practice among website owners that helps streamline requested data by taking some of the request strain off of the server. When a website ‘caches’ content, it tells your local computer to store previously accessed static data (like HTML) into a temporary file. If you leave a website that utilizes caches and then return to it later, your computer will fetch the cached content first from your hard drive before attempting to load the rest of the page. This improves site performance by taking a bulk of the full request away from the website host, allowing it to process the remainder of the request without the redundancy of reprocessing static information.

Proper website storage is also integral to maintaining a speedy site. What host your website lives on and how many other websites also live on that host can impact both the maximum size of your website and also the maximum size of allowable traffic to your site. It’s important to ensure that your website is housed on a scalable, secure host. Scalable infrastructure allows you to increase your website resources in the event that traffic to your site spikes, like when you launch a new product or have huge company news.